His only answer was a shrug and an enigmatic, “They’re not there, are they?”
“And you actually banged that scientist on the head with an oxy bottle?”
He grinned at the memory of it. “I sure did,” he admitted, impishly.
We were having dinner in our hotel suite. Sam couldn’t show his face in a restaurant, that’s how much public opinion had turned against him. We had needed six security guards just to walk us from the courtroom to the hotel.
“But he wasn’t a scientist,” Sam added, heaping broiled scungilli on his plate. Selene’s aquaculture produced the best shellfish off-Earth, and the hotel’s chef was a Neapolitan master artist.
“He was a science writer for DULL,” Sam went on. “Most of the so-called scientists on Europa were public-relations flacks and administrators.”
“Like Erskine?”
He nodded. “They weren’t doing research. They were busy pumping out media hype about their great green discovery.”
“That’s neither here nor there, Sam,” I said, picking at my own clams posilipo.
“Isn’t it?” He made a know-it-all smile.
“Sam, are you keeping something from me?” I asked.
“Me?”
“If you’ve got some information that will help win this case, some facts, witnesses—anything! We need it now, Sam. I’m supposed to open your defense tomorrow morning and I don’t have a thing to go on.”
“Except my testimony,” he said.
That’s what I was afraid of.
Yet the next morning I put Sam on the witness chair and asked him one single question: “Mr. Gunn, can you tell us in your own words what took place on Europa during the time you were there?”
“Soitinly!” Sam said, grinning.
The judges were not amused. Neither was the Beryllium Blonde, sitting at the prosecution’s table, watching Sam intently, her blue eyes focused on him like twin lasers.
The whole thing started—Sam said—with the Porno Twins. Cindy and Mindy.
You gotta understand that working those mining ships out there in the Asteroid Belt is hard, lonely work. Sure, there are women among the crews, but there’s always eight or nine more guys than gals on those factory ships, and the guys get—well, the polite word for it is horny.
(The chief judge huffed at that but didn’t interrupt. The Toad snorted. The Beryllium Blonde smiled.)
The Porno Twins supplied a needed service for the miners. Virtual sex, on demand. Oh sure, there were VR services from Earth-Moon, but the time lag meant that you couldn’t do real-time simulations: you had to buy a VR program that was prepackaged. It might have a few variables, but you more or less got a regular routine, take it or leave it.
The Porno Twins had come out to the belt and established themselves in a spacecraft that could swing around the area and maneuver close enough to the factory ships to do real-time simulations. You know, positive feedback and all that. You could talk with ’em, and they’d respond to you. It was great!
Well, anyway, the guys told me it was great. Some of the women used them, too, but that’s their business. I never did. Virtual reality is terrific and all that, but I prefer the real thing. I want to feel some warmth instead of grappling with an electronic fantasy.
I saw the twins’ advertisements, of course. They were really attractive: two very good-looking dolls who were identical down to their belly buttons, except that one was right-handed and the other was a lefty. Mindy and Cindy. Geniuses at what they did. They were natural redheads, but with VR they could be any color or shade you wanted.
It was the idea of their being twins that made them so popular. Every guy’s got a fantasy about that and they were happy to fulfill your wildest dreams, anything you asked for. And it was all perfectly safe, of course: they were usually a million kilometers away, feeding your fantasy at the speed of light with a real-time virtual reality link.
I had thought about dropping in on them for a real visit, you know, in the flesh. Me and every other guy in the belt. But they stayed buttoned up inside their own spacecraft; no visitors. None of us knew what kind of defenses they might have on their craft, but I guess we all realized that their best defense was the threat of leaving the belt.
So nobody molested them. If anybody gave even a hint that he might try to sneak out to their ship, his fellow miners dissuaded him—as they say—forcefully. Nobody wanted the Twins to leave us alone out in the dark and cold between Mars and Jupiter.
It was sheer coincidence that I happened to be the closest ship to theirs when their life-support system malfunctioned. I guess I’m lucky that way, if you can call it lucky when lightning strikes you.
I was trying to repair the mining boat Clementine when I heard their distress call. Most mining boats have minimal crews; Clementine was the first to be designed to run with no crew at all. Except it didn’t work right.
Mining boats attach themselves to an asteroid and grind up the rock or metal, sort it by chemical composition, and store it in their holds until they make rendezvous with a factory boat and unload the ores. Clementine was chewing up its target asteroid all right, but there was a glitch in the mass spectrometer and the idiot computer running the boat couldn’t figure out which stream of ore should go into which hold, so it stopped all operations halfway into the program and just clung to the asteroid like a scared spider, doing absolutely nothing except costing me money.
So I jetted out to Clementine from Ceres in my personal torch ship, leaving the company’s important business in the capable and well-trained hands of my crackerjack staff. I figured they could run things for maybe four-five days before driving me into bankruptcy.
So I’m in a battered old hard suit hanging weightless with my head stuck in the computer bay and my feet dangling up near the navigation sensors when the radio bleeps.
“This is SEX069,” said a sultry female voice. “We have an emergency situation. Our life support system has suffered a malfunction. Our computer indicates we have only eleven point four days until the air recycling scrubbers fail completely. We need help immediately.”
I didn’t have to look up the IAA registry to find out who SEX069 was. That was the Porno Twins’ spacecraft! I pulled my head out of the computer bay, cracking my helmet on the edge of the hatch hard enough to make me see stars, and jack-knifed myself into an upright position by the set of navigation sensors. Not easy to do in a hard suit, by the way.
Being designed to operate uncrewed, Clementine didn’t have an observation port or even cameras outside its dumb hull. But it had a radio, so I squirted off a message to the Twins as fast as my gloved fingers could hit the keypad.
“This is Sam Gunn,” I said, in my deepest, manliest voice. “Received your distress call and am on my way to you.” Then I couldn’t resist adding, “Have no fear, Sam is here!”
I got out of Clementine fast as I could and into my personal torch ship, Joker. While I was taking off my hard suit I had the Twins squirt me their location and their computer’s diagnostic readings.
Their craft was several million kilometers away, coasting in a Sun-centered orbit not far from the asteroid Vesta.
Now, Joker’s built for my comfort—and for speed. Her fusion-MHD drive could accelerate at a full g continuously, as long as she had reaction mass to fire out her nozzles. Any other rock jockey in the belt would have had to coast along for weeks on end to reach the Twins. I could zip out to Vesta in a matter of hours, accelerating like a bat out of sheol.